OPINION:
So Donald Trump won’t attend this year’s White House Correspondents Association dinner. Perhaps only a Washington journalist with an inflated sense of professional importance would consider that big news. But it is noteworthy, considering that the last president to pass up this institutional dinner was Ronald Reagan, and he had a pretty good excuse: He was in recovery from a bullet wound delivered by a young man bent on killing him.
No doubt President Trump’s decision, coming after his brutal assault on some leading national news organizations as an “enemy of the people,” will generate the usual recriminations about the president’s incapacity for seeing or understanding the crucial role of the news media in the American democratic system. And that’s not an idle expression of concern, as the president does indeed seem to lack any such understanding.
But he doesn’t lack any understanding of the gulf that separates the vast mass of middle Americans from the nation’s favored elites, including the news media. And nothing casts the Washington press corps more vividly into the light of elitists grasping for celebrity status than the White House Correspondents Association dinner, a nationally televised celeb binge, a maelstrom of public preening.
Even NBC’s Tom Brokaw a few years ago wondered aloud whether this spectacle of Washington journalists getting cozy with Hollywood pooh-bahs didn’t harm the press corps’ image with the rest of the country. “Are we doing their business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles?’’ he asked, then suggested it appeared to be the latter.
Compare these dinners of today to what they were when Reagan had to send his regrets. Then they were internal Washington affairs, a rare moment in the year when official Washington and its journalists could come together in a social setting to demonstrate some mutual appreciation, get to know each other a little better, and apply a little lubrication to the wheels of Washington interaction. Nobody thought that anybody out in the country could care a whit about this harmless little Washington institution.
Then some journalists hit upon the idea of calling attention to themselves by inviting guests who could bring oodles of attention to those issuing the invitations. First it was Fawn Hall, who gained national notoriety during the Iran-Contra scandal by demonstrating a remarkable ability to shred documents with blistering dispatch. But then Hollywood entered the picture, and soon famous actors were strutting their stuff on the red carpet — a red carpet! — leading into the Washington Hilton. Soon Washingtonians and tourists were showing up every spring to catch a glimpse of these celebrity imports and cadge photos of them.
And the journalists? Many played along, seeking to grab a little celebrity status of their own through association, going gaga over this or that actress or television personality, clustering around an actress seeking to leverage the event to divert attention from her troubles with alcohol and the law.
Mr. Brokaw was right. This is not good symbolism for Washington journalists. And nobody in America understands the symbolism of politics better than Donald Trump. He wants to put the press corps in its place? He wants to undermine its standing with the American people so he can blame journalists for his political troubles? How better to do that than to call attention to this spectacle of excess in which the journalists themselves undermine their own image as serious purveyors of news and information critical to the nation’s ongoing civic struggles.
In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, only 41 percent of respondents said the media had been fair and objective in its coverage of Mr. Trump since he became president. Fully 51 percent said the country’s news outlets had been too critical of the president. Asked whether the news media had exaggerated the problems of the Trump administration, respondents said yes to the tune of 53 percent, while only 45 percent said that was not the case.
In presenting these results, The Wall Street Journal referenced a Gallup survey of last September that demonstrated that Americans’ trust in the mass media had dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with just 32 percent saying they had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media. In 1997, that figure was 53 percent.
No doubt political prejudices played a role in these numbers. Among those whose primary news source was the conservative Fox News, some 79 percent agreed with the statement that “the news media and other elites are exaggerating the problems of the Trump administration, because they are uncomfortable and threatened by the kind of change that Trump represents.’’ But that’s not the whole story. Even consistent viewers of the more liberal MSNBC embraced that statement in significant numbers — some 40 percent.
The American news media have a problem, and the White House Correspondents Association dinner is only a symbol of it. Responding to the challenges posed by the web and social media, they have moved away from the old virtues of fairness, objectivity and accuracy that once were hallmarks of American journalism in the era that succeeded the 19th century period of the partisan press. Thus, at a time when nobody knows whom to trust as purveyors of civic news and information, news organizations have become increasingly vulnerable.
And nobody smells vulnerability more acutely, or is more bent on exploiting it, than Donald Trump.
• Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington, D.C., journalist and publishing executive, is editor of The American Conservative. His next book, due out from Simon & Schuster in September, is a biography of William McKinley.
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